A little less of profits but a little more of jobs

Confcooperative, one of the main Italian cooperative organisations, celebrated its ninetieth birthday during the general assembly that was held in Rome on May 26. More than 1000 people took part to this event including important representatives of the social, political and economical Italian life. Representatives of the Government as the Ministers of State Tremonti (Minister of the Economy and Finance), Sacconi (Minister of Labour Policy), Scajola and Ronchi took part in the meeting. In his message, the Confcooperative President Mr. Luigi Marino described the goals achieved and the future challenge for the cooperative movement.

Confcooperative represents a system of 20.000 enterprises with 506.000 members and an aggregate turnover of 62 billions Euros. It has doubled its economic weight in the last ten years and is still growing during the present crisis but worrying alarms are coming up mainly in the southern regions of Italy. Credit crunch and late payments by the public administrations are other opened questions to be solved to go out from the crisis. One of the strongest points underlined by Mr. Marino is that the cooperative movement is growing but a strong growth has been registered in social and worker cooperatives. Moreover a big part of new cooperatives are constituted by new Italian citizens, people coming from immigration, and in this sense the cooperative enterprises are acting a key role for social cohesion and integration.

President Marino underlined the key role of cooperative enterprises as a tool to go out from the crisis but new and wide European and International rules are needed to bring the finance and the economy closer to reality. “A little less of profits but a little more of jobs” has been the slogan launched by the President Marino during the meeting and it has been appreciated also by the Cardinal Bagnasco who talked about the cooperative enterprises as a instrument for human growth and not only for economic achievement.